I really dislike how Duke was included in this, it feels very forced. The end of Superheavy kind of made up for it since he had a connection to the overall plot but I feel having Dick or Damien be the one to have the moments with Bruce would have been much more meaningful.

Snyder (in interviews and through Alfred) made it a point to go over how Bruce's brain wasn't the same and that everything that was Batman was gone....then all it takes is a train scene and he's having flashes of Bats. The whole sequence with him getting his memories back was out there and I'll need to reread it again to understand it probably.

Some really great stuff in this arc though. Obviously the art, the self awareness/meta comments (though almost too many), Joker at the lake for some examples. I really hope we get some more time devoted to what the hell happened with Bruce's body/mind and how he feels about Alfred's behavior with keeping Batman a secret while helping the Robins.

Captain America: Castaway in Dimension Z Book One: I dug it. It's wildly different from Brubaker's Cap and has a lot of sci-fi thrown in there while still keeping to the core of Steve Rogers as a person. So far, it feels like a good Brubaker pallet cleanser leading into Spencer's run.

I'm curious to see how they deal with the time jump once Steve comes back to the world. Not just literally, but how it potentially changed him.

Spider-Gwen #5: I'm glad that I waited this long to read this because I would have been like, "That's it? Are you kidding?". They had a new take on Felicia Hardy which ties into Matt Murdock which I found super interesting but the book ends with tons of loose threads and no apparent end. Hindsight being what it is, that's not the case since months later they came out with yet another "#1" but I would have been annoyed at the time. Still, looking forward to reading more of this. To me, it captures the stuff I liked about a young Spider-Man and gives it a stylish twist.

Currently about halfway through the Absolute edition of Batman: Hush. (The library had both the regular paperback and the deluxe hardcover, so why not?) So far it seems...competent, I guess would be the most fitting word. It's best when you're not thinking too hard about it, since some of the plot just beats come out of nowhere. Catwoman gives Batman a kiss, so all of a sudden he's creepily obsessed with her? Okay. A childhood friend of Bruce Wayne's appears to have been killed by the Joker, and that's the thing that makes Batman decide "okay, I'm gonna cross the line I said I would never cross and kill Joker now"? All righty then. I'm expecting Loeb to totally blow this mystery in the end, just like he did in his Batman comics with Tim Sale, but I guess we'll see.

I'm also partway into Batman: Tales of the Demon. This is a long-out-of-print trade from 1990 that collects some of Ra's Al Ghul's earliest appearances by Denny O'Neil and artists like Neal Adams, Irv Novick, and Dick Giordano. Some of these are pretty great, but it's obvious that some of Ra's's appearances have been skipped because there are quite a few narrative gaps. It's hard to tell exactly what's missing, though, since (like most DC trades from before the mid-2000s or so) this book doesn't include the original covers; there is a tables of contents, at least, but it doesn't mention the original issue numbers. I'm going to have to do some research and see if these stories have been collected in some more complete form. (I don't think they have been, though, or at least not all of them have.)

I'm very excited. My brother got a copy and I'm borrowing it from him tonight after Rifftrax Live.

And I finished Chew, on Sunday. That book hits the lading so well, it's insanely impressive. There's some great moments leading up the end, but what makes that last issue and final moments so great is how true it is to the series and characters. For a series that is largely irreverent, there's a lot of character deaths at the end of the book that got to me.

It's a very silly series and incredibly violent in a lot of parts, but I wholeheartedly recommend it. The best comparison I can make(which might turn some people off) would be to Adult Swim cartoons in the humor and violence. It's well thought out and impressively plotted out with the mysteries.

I'll keep an eye out if it goes on a Humble Bundle sale, since it's a big commitment for the full series. For a comic of this length, I usually use the library system, but a friend of mine was gracious enough to lend it to me.

E3 really set me back, but I got back into the swing of things recently.
Superior Foes of Spider-Man 4 & 5: Man this book is good. I've laughed countless times reading it, this is so my sense of humor. There are a few gags that are a bit too "zany" but they are funny so I don't mind them as much. This has been a great book to get me back to reading comics.

The Amazing Spider-Man 8-10: This is a well done book, so much so that I like it despite hating Peter being so different than what I've been used to. It's been nice to see what all of these characters have been doing since I stopped reading Superior Spider-Man. I'm hoping that Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man makes good on its promise although I guess it will be running alongside this title?

Captain America Castaway on Dimension Z First two issues of Book 2: Maybe it's because I had espionage overload reading so much of Brubaker's Cap but I'm really enjoying this. I can see how this would be frustrating to read monthly but it reads pretty well all at once. Eager to see how this ends.

I liked Batman: Hush in a comfort food sort of way. You are right in that if you put any amount of thought to it, you start seeing it's flaws but its fun and the art is gorgeous.

Batman: Hush: I finished this a while back, and yep, Loeb totally blows the ending with at least three different plot developments that come out of left field. Good-looking comic, though, and it was interesting to see all the Jim Lee variants, sketches, and fan commissions included in the Absolute edition.

Batman/Wildcat: This trade came out a month or so ago and collects a few 1990s miniseries in which Wildcat co-stars with Batman and Catwoman, plus six 1970s team-ups from The Brave and the Bold (the DC equivalent of Marvel Team-Up, but starring Batman instead of Spider-Man). I hadn't really even heard of Wildcat before, so I skipped to the second half and read the classic issues first. Those were pretty awesome. The 1990s comics...weren't. In fact, despite reading a lot more quickly than the older issues, they took me a lot longer to get through because they were so miserable. This was totally worth it for the classic issues, though. I'm thinking more and more about getting the Batman: The Brave and the Bold Bronze Age Omnibus, which includes all of those issues and a lot more.

Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years: About a hundred pages into this hardcover, which is sort of a "best of" collection of Batgirl's various appearances. I've been reading a lot of 1960s and '70s DC comics lately -- between Teen Titans: The Silver Age Omnibus Vol. 1, Batman: Tales of the Demon, Batman/Wildcat, and Batman/Superman: Saga of the Super Sons -- but this book is the first one that I've had any trouble getting through. Batgirl's early appearances are pretty sexist and haven't aged well at all. I'm almost out of the 1970s now, and I'm really looking forward to getting to the later material.

I'm convinced that there's a CGB conspiracy where you guys all agreed to say everything is a couple notches better than you actually think it is to force me into taking a negative position when I otherwise wouldn't. It's a lot of fun, but it's not even the best Batman book that Tom King put out in June.